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Now, for the first time, these two observer-designer-theorists (Robert Venturi & Denise Scott Brown)
turn their iconoclastic vision onto their own remarkable partnership
and the rule-breaking architecture it has informed. The views of Venturi
and Scott Brown have influenced architects worldwide for nearly half
a century. Pluralism and multiculturalism; symbolism and iconography;
popular culture and the everyday landscape; generic building and electronic
communication are among the many ideas they have championed. Here,
they present both a fascinating retrospective of their life work and
a definitive statement of its theoretical underpinnings. Accessible,
informative, and beautifully illustrated, Architecture as Signs and
Systems is a must for students of architecture and urban planning,
as well as anyone intrigued by these seminal cultural figures. Venturi
and Scott Brown have devoted their professional lives to broadening
our view of the built world and enlarging the purview of practitioners
within it. By looking backward over their own life work, they discover
signs and systems that point forward, toward a humane Mannerist architecture
for a complex, multicultural society. - from Amazon Review |
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This is the catalog for an exhibition originating at the Philadelphia Museum of Art and traveling to the Museum of Contemporary Art in La Jolla, CA, and the Heinz Architectural Center in Pittsburgh. Brownlee (art history, University of Pennsylvania), David De Long (architecture, University of Pennsylvania), and Kathryn Hiesinger (curator of European decorative arts, Philadelphia Museum of Arts) discuss architecturalaccomplishments and their decorative arts via drawings and color plates. The chronology and project list includes 400 projects designed between 1957 and 2000. - adapted from Amazon Review |
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Von Moos' text, amply illustrated,
meticulously describes and catalogues the firm's evolution and work. This
book should provide a valuable reference to the work of a uniquely American
firm. |
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This new collection of writings argues for a generic architecture defined by
iconography and electronics, an architecture that has used meaning as shelter
and symbol. It is a call to architecture to recover its lost soul.
Venturi is known as an architect who communicates his architectural ideas,
formal and verbal, with grace and wit. In that sense, this book is vintage
Venturi. These essays, letters, reports, lectures, manifestos, and polemical
texts offer a candid, irreverent view from the drafting room - or, as he says, "commonsense responses, urgent and diverse, of a busy architect," who finds
himself bothered by the conceptualizing of architecture and the contamination of
the field by other disciplines. Seven of the essays were co-authored by Denise
Scott Brown. |
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Edited by Frederic Schwartz. Here, Robert Venturi reflects on this seminal building from a distance of over a quarter of a century. He discusses why its style and form, once so revolutionary, are accepted now. Equally important, he reminisces about "how hard it was for me, as its author, to arrive at." This book presents for the first time all of the developmental drawings that were executed to accompany the six stages of the design. |
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On Houses and Housing illustrates a great diversity in styles and commissions. Social housing, such as the seminal Guild House or the oriental-inspired Chinatown Housing, are included, as well as designs for individual residences. By focusing on houses as luxuriant as the House in Connecticut alongside projects as 'ugly and ordinary' as Brighton Beach Housing -- the competition entry in which the term was in fact coined -- their range proves to be as wide as their concept of 'home.' |
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Denise Scott Brown's role in VSBA --as an interdisciplinary, cross-continental link and a collaborator in translating urban ideas into architectural terms -- is not well known. In these essays, which are in part autobiographical, she surveys the richness of architectural and urbanistic thinking that has emerged from the "three disciplines of three countries" of her professional and suggests that urban ideas that are very meaningful to Venturi and Scott Brown could be useful to others. At the end, the transcript of a panel discussion after the Tate Gallery lecture reveals a fascinating confrontation between British and American ways of seeing urbanism, with Scott Brown performing what is perhaps her most useful function -- linking things together. |
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These seventeen essays span thirty-two years in the careers of Robert Venturi and Denise Scott Brown. In these careers one can see the inextricable blending of the building of buildings and the building of words. They "look, analyze, synthesize, through writing, synthesize through design, then look again." A leading exponent of the Postmodern, VSBA has been in the forefront of new approaches in architecture and design, combining traditional with modern. And their writing has been viewed as "brilliant and liberating."
This book continues the groundbreaking work begun in Complexity and Contradiction in Architecture and Learning from Las Vegas. It is a remarkable accolade to the sustained brilliance of two minds and to the tradition they have advanced of thinking, writing, and building. |
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Learning from Las Vegas created a healthy controversy on its appearance in 1972, calling for architects to be more receptive to the tastes and values of "common" people and the commercial vernacular and less immodest in their erections of "heroic," self-aggrandizing monuments. This revision includes the full texts of Part I of the original, on the Las Vegas Strip, and Part II, "Ugly and Ordinary Architecture, or the Decorated Shed," a generalization from the findings of the first part on symbolism in architecture and the iconography of urban sprawl. |
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"I am especially pleased to have had the wit to assert in [my original introduction] that Complexity and Contradiction was 'the most important writing on the making of architecture since Le Corbusier's Vers une Architecture of 1923.' What counts is that this brilliant, liberating book was published when it was. It provided architects and critics alike with more realistic and effective weapons, so that the breadth and relevance which the architectural dialogue has since achieved were largely initiated by it." - Vincent Scully, April, 1977 |
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The influential theories and powerful work of this esteemed international design firm are
documented in a concise, one-volume format. Architects and partners, the studio of
husband-and-wife team of Robert Venturi and Denise Scott Brown has always believed that
good design is a collective endeavor, attaching very special value to the contributions of
the many renowned associates who have worked with them on notable projects. A full account
of their studio's brilliant collaborations comes alive in these pages. - from Barnes & Noble Review |
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